AirBlade – A milestone in loudspeaker driver technology Seminar

Time:

16:00
- 17:00

Date:

16 October 2018

Venue:

Building 13/ 3021

Event details

ISVR Engineering Research Seminar Series

Loudspeakers are used in billions of devices worldwide ranging from smartphones, laptops, tablets to wireless speakers and yet the vast majority of them is based on the same principle that was developed in the early 1920s by Rice and Kellogg. This principle of the so called dynamic driver is fairly simple, which is why it continues to be used, but it also has major drawbacks, electrically, mechanically and acoustically. In this talk a new technology will be presented that can be considered a milestone in loudspeaker driver technology. Unlike with traditional drivers that are using a single heavy diaphragm with separate voice coil attached to it, the AirBlade technology utilises very light ring-shaped foil elements as diaphragm, where conductive traces are directly laminated onto it. By distributing the diaphragm area over several layers and implementing a curved shape, AirBlade avoids the typical beaming problem of traditional drivers the while achieving higher power handling, reduced distortion and better air coupling due to its large surface area.

Speaker information

Arthur Marker, Arya Audio Labs. Arthur obtained his BEng in Electrical Engineering from the DHBW University Stuttgart, Germany in 2012 before completing the MSc course in Engineering Acoustics at the University of Southampton in 2013. For his MSc thesis on “Using a hearing loss simulator to test a TV loudspeaker array” he received the E.J. Richards award for the best dissertation. After graduating, Arthur continued to work for the University of Southampton with focus on microspeakers and acoustic echo cancellation. Arthur left the university to work for Apple in California, USA on audio hardware design, acoustic validation and audio tuning. Due to his interest in audio technologies and his work in this field he became fascinated with the idea to find ways how to overcome the limitation of current driver technologies. What followed were extensive R&D activities to bring a new transducer concept to life, resulting in the company Arya Audio Labs being established in 2017. In May 2018 Arya Audio Labs officially introduced the AirBlade concept to the general public for the first time with great interest from the industry and press.